We’ve all heard the buzz words that our society tosses around and overuses until they lose their meaning. “Self-care,” “self-love,” “mental health,” and other clichés that make us feel like we have been beaten over the head with them.
But clichés are clichés for a reason.
We label them as such because we use them a lot. And we use things a lot when they are necessary. Self-care is something that can be easily forgotten in a world where it is the easiest thing to get caught up in what everybody else is doing. Social media shoves other’s lives in your face without giving you a behind-the-scenes look at what’s really going on. Advertisements seldom offer any use, as most offer solutions - not to help solve the problems in your life, but to mask insecurities humans have. New clothes, botox, hair implants, breast implants, weight loss, getting rich - all flash before your eyes daily.
We’re also nice people, and we like to help others. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Sometimes, however, it’s easy to forget that you need help sometimes, too. When you don’t give yourself the attention you need, you slowly deteriorate into a lesser version of yourself and, once you’re a shell of what you used to be, it becomes nearly impossible to help others the way you were able to when you were whole.
So what can you do to make sure you’re putting your best foot forward into the world every single day? Here are some things that you can implement to make sure you are the best possible version of yourself.
We’ll start with the obvious one. Establishing a physical activity routine is essential to your physical and mental longevity. Glossing over the obvious physical benefits, consistent physical exertion increases muscle growth, blood flow to all body parts, and energy levels. It allows you to make athletic movements later in life, when others will struggle to perform basic tasks. Staying active decreases risk of chronic injuries, such as knee pain, back pain, and other areas that may overcompensate for carrying around excess weight for long periods of time. The increased blood flow greatly reduces risk of heart attack and other killers.
Staying active also increases your daily productivity. The increase in blood flow carries more oxygen to vital organs and muscles, such as the brain, providing more mental clarity throughout the day. Many world famous authors, such as Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, and Henry David Thoreau were all avid walkers and believed that walking and writing went hand in hand. Walking has closely been intertwined with art as well. In fact, many artists in the 1960’s and 70’s performed “walking art,” which involved going on walks outside and focused on the artist’s personal experience with external stimuli.
Of course not everyone is an author or an artist. However, getting the blood flowing can have many benefits beyond increasing creativity. Health, happiness, and productivity can all see boosts when you get your body up and move it around.
This one is personal. I remember when I was in my late teens - around the ages of eighteen and twenty to be exact. I was a baseball player. And because I was a baseball player, I hated school. It was a chore, an obligation - something I had to do before I could go out onto a baseball field and get to the fun part of life. I found the knowledge to be useless and the teachers to be monotonous. It was, in a word, excruciating.
Books were an extension of that. They were more work and more thinking. I questioned why I would spend my time away from school practicing more school. It didn’t make any sense to me, so I stayed away from words and pages.
Then I left high school and got to junior college. I was surrounded by many people who shared the same values as me. We all spent our energy in similar ways. And when we were spending our time in places outside the baseball field, I noticed something.
We were boring.
Our conversations had no substance. Much of our time was wasted. I found myself uncomfortable when faced with human interaction. I couldn’t hold a conversation. I couldn’t think of anything interesting to do with myself. If I wasn’t on the baseball field, I was bored. And I realized something: bored people are boring people.
My thoughts were dull. Where there should have been deeper layers of visualizing and imagining was emptiness. I was unable to take concepts and deconstruct them or dive further into them. Everything was surface level.
And then one day, I was at an airport. I was just out of college and had little idea on where to take my life. I had a college degree, yet I still felt I knew little about the world around me.
While waiting for my layover, I decided to wander into one of the convenience stores. It was a decision that seemed inconsequential at the time, yet entering that store changed the rest of my life.
I found a book.
It wasn’t a fictional book. I had spent my life hating fiction - the one genre that had been pushed down my throats by the public school system and had convinced me that it was the only remaining type of book in existence.
It was a nonfiction book. An entrepreneurial book. It was called “Rich20something,” and it discussed everything from starting a business to building clientele to acquiring skill sets and creating value. I was hooked. After I finished it, I dove into more books that were similar to it. I began looking into ways to create businesses. My first few ideas were awful. To say they could have been thought of by a five-year-old would be an understatement. But I started, and that’s what matters. These books pried my eyes open to what I was truly capable of and sparked a drive for acquiring knowledge and soaking in what great gifts life had to offer.
I always thought that as I got smarter, the world would grow smaller, but it did the exact opposite. I became aware of how many areas of the world I was previously ignorant of, and I realized just how much there is to learn out there. Instead of letting the influx of information overwhelm me, it motivated me to collect as much of it as possible in my short time on Earth.
Growing up, I was a slob. In college, my dishes rotted in the sink. My clothes rotated from my body to the laundry hamper to the washing machine to the floor. Looking back, it was disgusting. It disgusted my roommates, too, not that I could blame them. I was messy, and my messes invaded others’ spaces.
I don’t know when it happened, but I’m a changed man now. My dishes find their way in the dishwasher right away. My clothes get put away right after being washed. Things that are used and out of place don’t stay that way for long. I don’t know when I changed. I think it was just gradual, and getting engaged and subsequently married probably didn’t hurt either.
In truth, cleaning up after yourself is a form of self-care. It accomplishes more than just keeping things clean around you. Each time you complete these tasks you complete something. You set a goal, you tackle that goal, and you finish. Seeing things through to completion is an essential practice we need to incorporate in our lives. If we never learn to complete, everything around us will remain unfinished. Relationships break off with loose ends. Brilliant projects are started then forgotten about. Workout programs are begun but dropped after they become too arduous. When you practice the completion of small things, you train yourself to complete big things, and the ability to complete is what sets you apart from the crowd. Anybody can think of an idea, but few can carry it out to fruition.
Not to mention living in a clean house is way better than living in a pigsty.
This one is for the people-pleasers. How many times have we gone along with something simply because we are too afraid to say “no?” Don’t get me wrong, helping others is good, but what happens when it comes at your expense?
Or maybe it’s not a decision on whether or not to be selfless. Maybe it’s just doing something with friends that you know you shouldn’t, but you do it anyway because you’re terrified of disappointing them.
Our lives are a direct result of the choices we make. We all have a vision of where we want to be in the future. It doesn’t have to come in the form of a career. It can be who we want surrounding us, who we want to be, or what values we want to live by. Each choice we make takes us either a tiny bit closer or a tiny bit farther away from that vision. We only get a finite amount of time before that future is here, whether we are ready for it or not. Whatever choices we made leading up to that moment will determine where we are.
Because of this, learning to say “no” is vital for two reasons. First, time is the most valuable currency. If you spend it doing what others have in mind for you, then you are being a passive member of your own life, simply doing others’ bidding. Second, even though helping others is important, it’s harder to help others when you are a shell of yourself. Being a people-pleaser can be taxing. You give and give until you have nothing left, never stopping to fill up your own tank. Once you are on “empty,” how are you supposed to keep on giving? You can’t help others to the best of your ability if you are not at your best to begin with. If saying “no” means protecting yourself from being overworked, overused, and taken advantage of, then it is probably worth learning to use that word.
When I played baseball, I was obsessed with the mental game. I was never the biggest, fastest, or strongest, but I believed that if I could master the game being played in between my ears, I could compete at a high level. The most uncomfortable concept for me to grasp was self-talk. It was awkward, like I was forcing a conversation with myself. Real life isn’t like the movies, where you have a full-on conversation with your own conscience inside your head. Your thoughts are more fluid. They come out as feelings and urges and attitudes.
But as I learned more about the mental game, I learned how important self-talk truly is. At first I felt like I was lying to myself. I felt like an idiot, telling myself things that I knew were blatantly false. Things like, “I’m the best player on the field,” and “I am better than this pitcher.”
But I stuck with it. It felt forced, but I battled through it.
And then after a while, the lying stopped.
Not because I stopped talking to myself, but because I started to believe the words that were coming out of my mouth… or brain. And the craziest thing happened: I started playing like the best player on the field. I was better than most of the pitchers. My confidence in my baseball ability rose and, as a result, my play improved and my numbers ballooned.
Confidence in life is a funny thing. Many make the mistake of waiting until it comes along and decides to bless them with its presence. However, confidence isn’t seeking for anybody. It’s you who has to go find it. It’s not success that leads to confidence. It’s the other way around. It’s the easy choice to wait around until we have the belief in ourselves to go make something of our lives, but that only leaves us stuck in a vicious cycle, victims to whatever the most recent external stimuli does to our confidence level.
In truth, it’s the confident person that experiences success, not the successful person who gains confidence. If you want success, your part has to come first. Lie to yourself. Tell yourself you can do it, even if you think you can’t. And one day, you may just find yourself capable of anything.
Self-Care
Self-care isn’t something to be abused. It’s not something to revolve our lives around, as our lives shouldn’t only revolve around us. Just like anything, it’s a balance. Care for yourself, but care for others as well. However, if you want to best improve the world around you, then you have to come first. Your best version of yourself does more good than all other versions of you combined. So take care of yourself. Make yourself awesome. Then go make the world around you awesome. Subscribe for more personal development content & follow our social media page @divinecreatorbrand.